We all know that parent/child, didactic workplace cultures where leaders emphasise control and authority over subordinates can be damaging to productivity, engagement, motivation and basically any positive metric we can seek to measure a businesses performance against.
Even better, the business world appears to be working this out now too. Far greater focus is now being placed on employee engagement, flattening of organisational structures and flexible approaches to work.
But what about workplace learning?
Sure we've moved from training to learning and development, even on to organisational development. Trainers have become facilitators. Cohorts are now guided through experiences instead of being lectured at. In some cases even PowerPoints have been conciled to the past!
So we've got it cracked? Well not quite. You see in L&D's desperation to be taken seriously we've set off on an agenda of codifying learning.
We track what people learn, devise career paths which tell people what to learn. We invest in wondrous LMS software to direct staff to what they should be learning and report on their engagement with their prescribed courses. We send updates to managers about which staff still aren't engaging with x training.
Reading this, you can start to see words which should start ringing alarm bells in the world of modern workplace culture- "track", "tell", "direct", "prescribe". In our efforts to be taken credibly we've started to talk the language of the very cultures we're seeking to change and evolve.
We advocate trusting our employees, autonomy to improve engagement, yet at the same time we tell them which is the right course to take and when, what tools they need to use to learn, and closely monitor their progress. These aren't behaviours which show a trusting business function. It screams we don't trust our employees to take responsibility of their own learning and the direction of their career.
There are recent improvements, the rise of curation signalling a move from courses to resources. Whilst this is progress, we're still telling people what they should be reading rather than trusting them to find this under their own steam.
So how do we fix it? Can we fix it? Should we fix it?
If we were to try and transfer control of learning to individuals and stop monitoring them then we'd be completely lost when it comes to proving ROI. But then most attempts I've seen at calculating ROI are wildly inaccurate estimates anyway.
I guess the biggest problem of handing control of learning back to individuals is the very real possibility that they might not need us any more at all! Then we definitely won't get a seat at the table.
So is that it? Game over for L&D. Or is there another way?
What do you think?
Comments
Thanks Kathryn! Firstly that would be an amazing experiment to conduct! It would be really interesting to see what would happen.
I think one potential direction L&D could take to move away from this is something similar to the approach which Sky have been using in conjunction with Looop. I read an article about how they were looking to create learning interventions which were avaiable immediately at the point of need. So if someone were working on something and found a problem they couldn't get around, there would be learning available to them in that instant which they could tap in to help them fix their problem and keep working. Here is the link to this - http://www.fosway.com/innovation-profile-sky/ . This is a really interesting and thought provoking case study.
I also like the ideas of Nick Shackleton-Jones on Learning Elimination - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-age-learning-elimination-nic...
You are right that ultimately it boils down to performance and improving it. I guess the issue we have in L&D is trying to prove that our interventions have caused that improvement. If we were to give up trying to prove how important we are, and just got on with being important, would the wider business realise our importance or would we be just an invisible hand shaping things in the background?
I've been thinking on this a bit more too. I guess in a world of self directed learners, we would almost be like guidance counsellors and learning coaches. Employees who decide that they want to learn more about something but don't know where to start could come to us for advice and guidance without us directly telling them what to do.
We could also act to improve systems where obvious points of failure become clear, or produce On Demand training for common repeated problems within our workplaces too.
Thanks
Chris
That's a really interesting question - if our organisations chose to adopt these new strategies, what would our jobs in L&D look like? It might be worth it's own discussion on the forum.
In terms of what our jobs would look like. I think In the short term we would be the champions of this new approach. Essentially we would be the permission givers. We'd be there to reassure people that they can find their own solutions to their problems. That they are allowed to explore and that learning isn't an outside of workflow task or experience, that they are constantly learning through completing tasks.
But in the long term, I don't know. Our work in L&D would be very different. It could be that we become process analysts, looking for common points of failure or inefficiencies which we can fix, or it may be a more human approach, coaching people to help them create their own long term development goals and work with them to help them achieve them.
What are your thoughts? Would love to hear other people's thoughts too!
Chris